Beat the Streets' Denzel Perez, Emili Lok earn 2024 Bill Claps Wrestling Scholar-Athlete Award

The recipients receive a $1,000 scholarship for academic and wrestling excellence.

Beat the Streets student-athletes Denzel Perez and Emili Lok were each named 2024 Bill Claps Wrestling Scholar-Athlete Award recipients this week.

Since 2005, the award has been given annually to one boy and one girl student-athlete from a New York City public high school to encourage and support academic and wrestling excellence. The recipients each receive a $1,000 scholarship.

Perez qualified for the state tournament by winning a Division 2 Public Schools Athletic League (PSAL) Boys Folkstyle City Championship. The Eagle Academy for Young Men in The Bronx graduate credits the academic resources provided to him as a BTS Academy member for helping him get accepted to the University of Pennsylvania, where he will study business.

Lok captured sixth place at the PSAL Girls Freestyle City Championships for Stuyvesant High School. Lok, who will be a senior this fall, has already completed several AP courses and serves as a peer tutor for AP European History at her school.

About Bill Claps: Bill is a mixed media artist and filmmaker living in New York City, who was a successful student and wrestler at Glen Ridge High School in New Jersey and at Harvard University.  He assisted in the expansion planning for the New York PSAL wrestling program, and in 2008 the PSAL decided to name the scholarship the Bill Claps Wrestling Scholar-Athlete Award.

According to Claps, “Wrestling played a huge part in my development as a young man, and the mental discipline, training and goal orientation I learned in the sport has helped me immensely throughout my life.  With this scholarship I wanted to give back to the sport and provide a structure that encourages students to work hard to achieve their goals.”      

Since 2005, more than 25 scholar-athletes have received college scholarships from the fund.

Since being founded in 2005, Beat the Streets has pioneered a movement that now includes 150 individual wrestling programs, a youth league and the first girls high school league. BTS works to develop the full human and athletic potential of the urban youth and strengthen the New York City wrestling culture.

We aim to make a lifelong impact on student-athletes through the lessons learned on the wrestling mat -- discipline, perseverance, self-reliance, humility and a strong work ethic. Discover how you can make a meaningful contribution to our work at btsny.org/donate.